Showing posts with label video. Show all posts
Showing posts with label video. Show all posts

Monday, December 22, 2008

Get Around Flash Videos that Crash Firefox

Day 48

I blogged on day 24 the woes of watching flash videos with Firefox. Every third video or so will cause Firefox (and sometimes the entire Eee) to freeze for about a minute before presenting a pop up asking if you want to terminate the program. Conveniently, when Firefox restarts it asks if you'd like to restore tabs from the previous session. I could live with this if I didn't have to wait for the error message - it feels like forever when you're anxiously waiting to Barry Maniroll yourself.


Here's a simple workaround. Instead of starting Firefox by double clicking on the icon or choosing it from the launch menu, open it using the console. In easy mode, press ctrl+alt+t, or in advanced mode select it from launch-->applications-->systems (I actually have it added to my desktop for quick access). Simply type "Firefox" and hit enter. You can even add a web address in the console to save a step once Firefox is open.

The advantage to this is that if/when a flash video freezes, you don't have to wait for the termination message to display. Simply close the console, and Firefox will terminate. When you reload it, it will ask if you want to continue from where you left off.

This doesn't fix the Linux/Flash problem, but using the console does make it a bit more tolerable.

Friday, November 28, 2008

Day 24

I spend much of my free time getting wrapped up in viral videos posted on sites like youtube and digg. The relationship between Flash and Linux has been a rocky one, and lagging or choppy videos on the Eee seems to be a recurring topic on Eee forums. Fortunately, that hasn't been the case for me. Instead, flash videos periodically cause Firefox to crash. It isn't any one specific video or site that causes this, so this has to be an issue with Xandros. And it may be a deal breaker for me.

Tomorrow is the 1/4 mark for my 100 days experiment. I think I'm going to celebrate by ditching Xandros in favor of EeeUbuntu. There's not harm in trying - if I hate it, I can use the supplied restore disk to bring back the original operating system.

Here are two of the crash messages from earlier today.